How One Night in Chinatown Changed Philly’s Cocktail Scene Forever
When Hop Sing Laundromat first opened, everyone thought it would fail. Instead, it ushered in a new era.
Inside Hop Sing Laundromat / Photography by Michael Persico
Philly’s cocktail scene is evolving thanks to a new generation of bartenders shaking things up. To celebrate the great minds pushing the limits of what can go in a glass, we’re declaring this Cocktail Week. Check back daily for stories from the print feature on the game changers revolutionizing the scene in the November issue of Philly Mag.
At 8 p.m. on the last day of February, 2012. That’s when Philadelphia’s modern cocktail renaissance began. And I was there to see it happen.
I wasn’t alone. Foobooz founder Art Etchells was there with me. As was pretty much every food and drinks writer in the city. And all of us were gathered for a special invite-only night of cocktails at Lê’s brand-new Chinatown bar, Hop Sing Laundromat.
Something you have to understand if you weren’t there: A lot of people thought there was a non-zero chance that Lê had gathered us all together in one place on the same night to have everyone killed. The press had not been friendly to him or his bar. People in Philly’s nascent cocktail community hadn’t exactly welcomed him. And if I had to guess, I’d say that at least half the crowd gathered at Hop Sing that night in February had only come to watch him crash and burn.
Lê and I have been friends for a long time. I was here when he first surfaced in Philly — this strange question mark of a man with weird glasses and a Roman-candle mouth. For months, he was all anyone could talk about. I’d interviewed him a couple times, been to his bar while it was still under construction. There were a hundred different rumors about him (some of them started by me), saying he was a drug dealer, a secret millionaire; that he was actually Batman and slept hanging upside down from the rafters of the unmarked building he’d leased at 11th and Race, claiming he was going to turn it into the greatest cocktail bar in America.
Which was ridiculous, of course. It was such a grand proclamation that he just laid out there without any hint of irony or self-doubt and then repeated (often) to anyone who would listen. Plus, at that point in history, Philly might have been a drinking town, but it wasn’t necessarily a cocktail town. Sure, you could get mixed drinks pushed across the long oak pretty much anywhere, but they were rarely anything you’d write home about. Starr’s Ranstead Room had been open for two years with a cocktail list designed by the late Sasha Petraske of New York’s Milk and Honey that leaned heavily on 1940s classics. Franklin Mortgage (which Lê hated like a mortal enemy) boasted gourmet ice and an almost literary six-page-long cocktail menu, presented in book form. But for the most part, the American cocktail revolution that started in New York and Seattle in the early 2000s had passed Philly by, so claiming that you were coming here to open the best cocktail bar in the country seemed brave, stupid, and arrogant all at the same time.
It also turned out to be true. Or mostly true, anyway.
That night, most of the gathered crowd was seeing Hop Sing for the first time. The nickel-topped bar, the towering racks of bottles and the rolling library ladders, the way the light fell on individual tables, the custom speed-racks and shakers he’d had designed just for his team, and every other fiddly detail of the place that Lê’s obsessive perfectionism had honed for speed or beauty or comfort — this was all new.
And the drinks? God, the drinks. Maybe one of the flat-out ballsiest things I have ever seen anyone in this industry do was Lê gathering every doubter, every hater, every potential enemy, and everyone who already believed his bar was doomed to fail together in a single room, standing up in front of them in a tailored suit, and offering them a screwdriver as their first drink.
A Hop Sing bartender pouring a screwdriver
Seriously, a screwdriver — vodka and orange juice. Probably the simplest, most basic cocktail in any bartender’s arsenal. But here, with its fresh-squeezed juice, still frothy from the shaker, and some kind of magical, super-call unicorn vodka, it was amazing. The best screwdriver I’d ever had, and one of the best cocktails, period.
And it went on like that — drink after drink, recipe after recipe, in this beautiful room where every detail had already been considered a hundred different times before the first real drink was ever poured. Lê had set out to open a great cocktail bar, and he’d succeeded (even if it would still take a few months before he was satisfied enough to open to the public). Was it the best in the country? Is it now? Who knows? That’s always going to be a matter of opinion. But Hop Sing deserves to be a part of that conversation for sure, and that’s not nothin’.
One thing I can say for sure: Hop Sing’s opening — and its fierce, sometimes one-sided competition with the other bars that made up Philly’s nascent cocktail scene — absolutely kick-started this city’s modern bar renaissance. What followed was an entire generation of bars that lived (and sometimes died) in its orbit. And now, 13 years later, today’s impressive roster of young, booze-focused upstarts — places like R&D, Poison Heart, Almanac, the Lovers Bar, Next of Kin, Andra Hem, a.bar, and a dozen others — still operates in its long shadow, continuing to push forward a cocktail culture that Lê, his team, and his unlikely Chinatown bar helped create on one night back in 2012.
Published as “Where it all Began” in the November 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
